GNU Emacs is the most popular and widespread of the Emacs family of editors. It is also the most powerful and flexible. Unlike all other text editors, GNU Emacs is a complete working environment—you can stay within Emacs all day without leaving.

, 3rd Edition tells readers how to get started with the GNU Emacs editor. It is a thorough guide that will also "grow" with you: as you become more proficient, this book will help you learn how to use Emacs more effectively. It takes you from basic Emacs usage (simple text editing) to moderately complicated customization and programming.The third edition of

describes Emacs 21.3 from the ground up, including new user interface features such as an icon-based toolbar and an interactive interface to Emacs customization. A new chapter details how to install and run Emacs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, including tips for using Emacs effectively on those platforms.

, third edition, covers:

Learning GNU Emacs

Learning GNU Emacs

Learning GNU Emacs

• How to edit files with Emacs

• Using the operating system shell through Emacs

• How to use multiple buffers, windows, and frames

• Customizing Emacs interactively and through startup files

• Writing macros to circumvent repetitious tasks

• Emacs as a programming environment for Java, C++, and Perl, among others

• Using Emacs as an integrated development environment (IDE)

• Integrating Emacs with CVS, Subversion and other change control systems for projects with multiple developers

• Writing HTML, XHTML, and XML with Emacs

• The basics of Emacs Lisp

The book is aimed at new Emacs users, whether or not they are programmers. Also useful for readers switching from other Emacs implementations to GNU Emacs.

10.3.2.2 Buffer highlighting

10.3.2.2 Buffer highlighting

The easiest way to use fonts and colors is to load the Lisp package font-lock.el (included with the Emacs distribution). This mode tries to highlight interesting features of your text buffers using color and different faces. As an example, try picking out comments in C and Lisp buffers, and painting them in a color that contrasts with the basic black of the code.

Font-lock mode tends to be especially helpful for colorizing programming language code or outline mode text but also gives useful results for HTML files and Dired buffers. In fact, we find it useful in so you may want to turn it on globally instead, as we did in "A Sample .emacs file" earlier in this chapter. If you want more examples using font-lock mode, refer back to Chapter 9 on some of the various programming language modes supported by Emacs.